Songwriter: Ginger Baker
Original Release: Blind Faith
Year: 1969
Definitive Version: None
The first year after we
bought our house, Debbie and I spent most of our time just figuring out what we
were doing, so we only tried to maintain the status quo. The next spring, in
1998, we started to add our own touches.
Debbie was very in to birds,
so working to attract them was our main addition. We started off with a hanging
feeder in the back of the yard, but that wasn’t close enough to the windows in
the back great room, so we added another feeder on a post in the middle of the
backyard. Then we added a suet feeder and a hummingbird feeder at the deck …
and a birdbath—anything to bring the birds close enough to be caught by the
lenses of Debbie’s omnipresent camera.
Of course, it wasn’t long
before the endless war against the squirrels trying to steal the food began in
earnest. At our nursery, in the area where they kept the bird products, they
had a cartoon of one masked squirrel holding up a few birds while another
stuffed the bird seed into a bag.
That’s right. Squirrels are
nothing more than the gun-toting thugs of the backyard. They’re rats with bushy
tails; that’s all. Baffles, grease on the pole and running out onto the deck
and chucking stones at the punks were employed to varying degrees of success.
What I really wanted was a BB gun to give them some real disincentive, but I
was afraid I’d shoot my eye out, so I didn’t take that drastic step.
Aside from the squirrels, we
attracted all kinds of birds. Cardinals, chickadees, nuthatches
and—especially—bluebirds were our favorites. Every once in a while we’d get
something we rarely noticed, like a cedar waxwing or a flicker. We also got some
birds that were unwanted, like a huge red-tail hawk that would bring the
activities of the backyard to an eerily silent halt.
I was on the deck once when
I noticed a downy woodpecker on the suet feeder. These birds generally are shy
around humans—they’d fly and not come back as soon as they heard me coming
around the corner or opening the back door—but this one didn’t move, even when
I was about a foot from it. I surmised that the hawk must be around, and the
woodpecker had picked its poison: The human might not want to eat me, but the
hawk definitely does. So I let it alone, and sure enough, I spotted the hawk up
on the power line. I chased him off.
Another time, however, I
wasn’t as successful in protecting the smaller birds. I was working in the
backyard during the summer and went to the garage to get something. When I came
back, just as I was turning the corner to enter the backyard, a mad rush of
birds buzzed over head, and I could see that the hawk had just come out of
nowhere and nailed a bird on the back feeder. I could see the bright red that
the hawk had pinned under its claws on the ground, stirring frantically. It got
a cardinal. I ran out, yelling, but it took off with its prey.
I was ticked. Why did it
have to be a cardinal? There are two million worthless sparrows out here to
which it was more than welcome. Why not take one—or a few dozen—of those? I
didn’t openly declare war on the hawk as I had the squirrels, but there would
be no détente between us after that. Yes, I know—the circle of life and all
that. That doesn’t mean I had to be happy about it.
The summer of 1998 also was
when we got our favorite backyard visitors, but I’ll leave that story for
another day.
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